Catch the Gray Lady When She Falls From the 14th Floor

Now that Black Friday has come, John Gabriel explores the leftwing elite’s distaste for the annual kickoff to the Christmas shopping season, at Ricochet.com:

Ah, Black Friday: The day wealthy whites are applauded for judging lower-class folks who are just trying to buy affordable gifts for their kids.

Huffington Post’s mocking headline blares “THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT!” followed by bold black and red stories of consumerism gone wild. New York’s Gawker features “The Best Walmart Thanksgiving Day Fight Videos” (I won’t dignify them with a link), while coastal elite news anchors cluck about the barbarians at the Target security gate.

I hate shopping on a regular day, let alone Black Friday. I’m hardly loaded, but would rather pay a few extra bucks to buy gifts on a slow day or online. Everyone doesn’t have that luxury.

Most of our progressive friends don’t seem to care. They cheer Walmart strikers, never noticing that the 1% doesn’t camp out for Black Friday sales. The howling picketers are merely making life more miserable for the have-nots.

New York Times readers have a chance to make it into the paper. These are the sorts of things they think will catch an editors’ eye — the sort of sentiments they think the NYT editors are looking for.

And they’re probably right.

Some highlights in the Conspicuous Compassion Floor Exercise of the Moral Preening Olympics:

To me it means getting in the car with my spouse and adult daughters and heading to Cape May…Birding! None of us buy into this nonsensical consumer binge day.

I love to crawl up inside those [innocent memories of childhood Black Fridays past] and hide on Black Friday these days. It’s become a blood sport that rewards the aggressive and punishes the elderly and disabled who can’t partake in mad dashes for limited sale items offered during insanely early hours. This year, Black Friday becomes Black Thursday and begins the erosion of Thanksgiving and one less day to create family memories.

Note the first complaint is that the “insanely early hours” on Friday punish the disabled and elderly. However, this year, they’ve stopped that, and begun sales on Thursday evening. And so this guy comes up with a complaint about that, too — ignoring the fact that they just addressed his “insanely early hours” complaint.

Whatever day they do this on, this guy is ready, willing, and able to grumble about how unfair it all is.

This morning, for the first time ever, I saw a group of anti-fur protesters in front of San Jose’s Santa Row, adding a welcome nostalgic 1970s atmosphere to the shopping experience of their fellow Bay Area leftists. When one of the them tried to hand me a brochure as part of his busywork today, I told him no thanks, this wasn’t my religion, which caused him no amount of cognitive dissonance — “This isn’t anyone religion!!??” “No, it’s definitely yours!”, my wife and I replied in unison. (God, I was so proud of her.)

As Christopher Caldwell wrote at the Weekly Standard a decade ago, a huge subset of the Democrat party consists of small town suburbanites who long to feel superior to their fellow small town suburbanites, and their hatred of both Thanksgiving and Black Friday is yet another component of their reactionary punitive leftwing mindset:

At some point, Democrats became the party of small-town people who think they’re too big for their small towns. It is hard to say how it happened: Perhaps it is that Republicans’ primary appeal is to something small-towners take for granted (tradition), while Democrats’ is to something that small-towners are condemned for lacking (diversity). Both appeals can be effective, but it is only the latter that incites people to repudiate the culture in which they grew up. Perhaps it is that at universities–through which pass all small-town people aiming to climb to a higher social class–Democratic party affiliation is the sine qua non of being taken for a serious, non-hayseed human being.

For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.

That last sentence can be extended out to their lashing out at America itself, and its traditions as well.

The greatest trick intolerant fanatics pulled was this: knowing that the Constitution forbid the imposition of religion, they designated their hateful and ugly belief as ideology; a trick that allowed them to legislate their morality into law while pretending it was both good and amoral.

By calling their spew “religion,” you degrade true religion by comparison, but accurately label it by the categories the Constitution has supplied us.

I'm sure that the NYT set a good example of foregoing consumer materialism by utterly refusing to run any Black Friday advertisements.

But since the flesh is weak no matter how earnest the spirit, enact a confiscatory tax on Black Friday newspaper, television, and radio advertising revenues. That would soon stop Black Friday sales in their tracks. No promotion, no locomotion. What say you, NYT?